Kevin Watson
Kevin Watson lives with his wife and children in Winston-Salem, NC. His stories have appeared in Reality Magazine, ART Ideas (the quarterly journal for American Renaissance for the Twenty-First Century), and The Rose & Thorn (http://members.aol.com/Raven763/). He writes of "Hallowed Ground":"I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, with the Vietnam War looming like a dark cloud on my horizon. Then, my senior year in high school, President Nixon brought our American troops back home. I remember, as a young boy, quizzing my parents about the war every evening when the current casualty stats were flashed on the TV evening news like baseball scores. I didn't understand the significance of all those numbers until I attended the funeral of my cousin, Staff Sergeant Clifford Dean Melton, and witnessed first-hand the impact just one of those deaths had on so many people. I had never met Dean, so I had lots of questions about him. My mother told me that he was a lot like me, tall, slender, and always joking around. I guess that's why I bonded with him, in a strange sort of way.
"On a recent trip, I saw a news magazine photograph of an impressive pile of about two hundred Army helmets, and I thought of Dean. Then I wondered how someone who had experienced war, first- or second-hand, might react to seeing such a startling and ugly sight."
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